CR

I really didn't think I'd be writing much in this blog when I gave up daily posting, but when a big names passes on--as seems to be happening with regular frequency these days--I feel like I should note it. And certainly Carl Reiner was a giant.  He made significant contributions as a writer, director and actor, and did it on stage, on TV, in movies, on records and in books.

Reiner was always interested in entertainment, and spent time in the Special Services during World War II performing for the troops. After the war, he appeared in a few Broadway shows before working on the classic TV variety program Your Show Of Shows.  Reiner played second banana to top banana Sid Caesar (in YSOS and Caesar's Hour), but held his own. He also contributed to the writing--and Caesar had the best writers in the business, including Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen and Mel Brooks.

Reiner and Brooks became close friends and started doing comedy bits.  The most famous was the 2000 Year Old Man routine, where Reiner would ask questions about the elderly gentleman's life and Brooks would improvise answers.  They just did it for friends at first, but eventually recorded the material and created a classic comedy album.

After leaving Caesar, Reiner was ready to create his own show. (First he wrote a novel, Enter Laughing, about a young man trying to break into show biz.)  He developed Head Of The Family, where he played a comedy writer who lived in the suburbs and commuted to Manhattan.  The pilot didn't sell, and apparently the problem was Reiner--the actor, not the writer.  The lead was recast and it became The Dick Van Dyke Show.

It lasted five seasons and 158 episodes, and still stands as one of the greatest sitcoms of all.  And while the cast is great, the man most responsible was Reiner--he created and produced the show, as well as writing over 50 episodes.  He also played recurring character Alan Brady--the egomaniacal star of the show within the show.

Meanwhile, Reiner's novel Enter Laughing was adapted into a successful Broadway comedy, starring the then-unknown Alan Arkin.  Reiner would write his own Broadway comedy in 1967, Something Different.  It's about a writer whose career is stalled, so he tries to recreate the same conditions that once made him successful.  The play was not a hit, but has an interesting story.  The first two acts were playing well in tryouts, but the third act was dying. So they cut the third act.  It didn't work, but a fascinating attempt.

While Dick Van Dyke was airing, Reiner took some time to write a screenplay for a Norman Jewison film, The Thrill Of It All, starring Doris Day and James Garner.  He also appeared (along with every other funny person in Hollywood) in It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.  When Dick Van Dyke ended, Reiner starred in the well-received Norman Jewison film The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (which also featured Alan Arkin in his first film role, for which he received an Oscar nomination).

As if that weren't enough, Reiner now became a film director, putting out The Comic (which he also wrote) in 1969.  About a troubled silent clown, it starred Dick Van Dyke.  Reiner followed it up with the cult classic Where's Poppa?, a comedy starring George Segal that's still pretty outrageous.

Reiner returned to TV in the early 1970s with The New Dick Van Dyke Show, which lasted three seasons and 72 episodes, though it never recaptured the magic of the original series.

Soon Reiner was back to directing films, helming the successful comedy Oh, God!, which made George Burns a big star late in life.  After that, Reiner did the Henry Winkler comedy The One And Only.  Winkler never quite made it in movies, but Steve Martin did, and Reiner and Martin worked together in four films--Martin's breakout movie The Jerk, followed by Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, The Man With Two Brains and All Of Me. (All are worth looking at, and All Of Me was a real leap forward in Martin's acting abilities.)  Reiner would go on to direct a number of other decent comedies in the 80s and 90s featuring, among others, John Candy, Mark Harmon and Bette Midler. (His son Rob's directing career took off as well, but that's another story.)

In the 1990s and beyond he did a lot of acting work.  He won an Emmy for his guest appearance in Mad About You, reprising the role of Alan Brady.  He also did notable work as old con man Saul Bloom in Ocean's Eleven (and Twelve and Thirteen).

Meanwhile, he published a delightful memoir in 2003, and a number of follow-ups.  Actually, he's done so much in his career it's exhausting just to think about it.

I saw him last year.  The Aero Theatre in Santa Monica was showing The Comic and Reiner answered questions afterwards, quick as ever.  People wanted to know about the movie, but also all about his life, and he seemed happy to oblige.  If they didn't have a second feature to show, I think we would have stayed listening to him for hours.  In fact, I'm sorry they didn't just cancel the movie and let him talk as long as he wanted.

The Numbers Game

As I've mentioned before, I don't post about the pandemic because what can I say? While there are some basic things everyone can and should do, overall we're still quite ignorant.  I certainly claim no special expertise.  And while I follow the numbers, they're hard to interpret.

But that doesn't stop others from using the stats for their own ends.  A lot of people want very badly to show that America has mishandled the pandemic, or that a number of states are mishandling it.  So, as always in politics, they use whatever data are available to prove their side.  Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but what they're doing isn't particularly helpful.

I bring this up because someone sent me a graph (sorry I can't figure out how to post it or even link it, but it's easy enough to look up these numbers) showing the United States has higher deaths per million than Europe or Canada.  Okay.  So what?

Shall we look at more numbers that don't necessarily prove anything, but that this graph conveniently leaves out? For instance, death per million by various countries (as of today--there is some slight disagreement on different charts, but they aren't that far apart):

United States:  391

France: 441

Sweden:  528

Italy: 550

Spain: 572

United Kingdom: 671.

While we're at it, let's look at the numbers for some individual states.

Texas:  86

California:  157

Florida:  181

Arizona:  245

Canada:  247

Illinois:  535

Michigan:  598

Massachusetts:  1224

New York:  1273

New Jersey:  1487

What do these numbers mean?  Don't ask me.  Or ask me in a few years.  Until then, let's try to figure out the best path forward without partisanship getting in the way.

Oh Boy

The Boys--the best show on Amazon Prime--has finally announced its season 2 starting date.  Fans had to wait months just to know when they could start watching again. The producers will released the first three episodes on Friday, September 4, and then offer a new episode each Friday till the finale on October 9.

Just a few points.

First, they've had this thing in the can for a while. (Obviously, since it had to finish shooting before the coronavirus scare--though it was actually completed late last year.) Season 1 dropped on July 26, 2019.  Why wait so long to put the second season out?

It's going to be a long, hot summer.  Everyone's stuck in place these days.  Why not do the fans a favor and move things up a bit due to exigent circumstances?

Finally, what's this one-episode-a-week garbage?  This isn't broadcast TV where you can only put one thing on at a time.  And you're not selling ads.  The whole show is ready--drop all the episodes at once and let the fans decide how to watch.

So two cheers for the announcement.

The Great Glaser

A year ago, I posted a tribute to graphic designer Milton Glaser on his 90th birthday.  Exactly one year later, he died.  We heart MG.

It's A Van Dyke, Not A Goatee

I was watching a group reaction video to Community's greatest episode, "Remedial Chaos Theory." Yes, that's what I do nowadays.

This is the episode where, in the darkest timeline, Abed makes goatees for the group so they can devote their lives to evil.  Later, in the discussion (around the 21 minute mark), one of the group notes that in an episode of South Park, Cartman from the evil universe has a goatee as well.  So apparently, he concludes, there's something about evil characters and goatees.

I know this group is young, but come on, everyone knows how goatees and evil became associated.  It was in the Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror." Kirk and crew beam to a parallel universe where the Enterprise is filled with evil characters. (How this conniving group, constantly plotting assassination, has remained stable enough to be in the same position as the regular Enterprise is hard to explain, but that's part of the fun of Star Trek).

There are many differences between the good Enterprise and the evil Enterprise--for instance, in the latter, officers carry daggers--but the best thing is in the evil Enterprise Spock sports a goatee. Why?  No reason, except what else would an evil Spock have?

In fact, long after everything else about the episode is vague or forgotten, the image of the bearded Spock remains.

JS

Joel Schumacher, who just died, was not the type of director who won Oscars.  He made commercial movies that critics rarely treated as high art.  But occasionally, he turned out something interesting.

He actually started as a costume designer in the 70s, working with directors such as Woody Allen--now there's someone who wins Oscars--on Sleeper and Interiors.  Then he became a successful screenwriter, working on films with African-American themes, such as Sparkle, Car Wash and The Wiz.

Then, after a couple TV movies, he graduated to features with Lily Tomlin's The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1981.  It did not please the critics, but I thought it wasn't bad.

He followed up with D.C. Cab and the quintessential brat pack movie St. Elmo's Fire.  Then he directed what is probably his best film, The Lost Boys.  It's about two brothers moving into a new town with their single mom.  The younger brother meets some friends who are vampire hunters while the older brother happens to meet a gang of teenage vampires. There are also subplots with the mom and their eccentric granddad. (I was going to say more but I'm trying to avoid spoilers.)

There's a lot to like about the film.  Schumacher manages a nice mix of horror and comedy, but also gives us a good feeling for what it's like to be young and living in a beach town.  The Lost Boys also has great visual style, and a good ending (that apparently they fought over behind the scenes).  It also had a horrible poster, playing up hunky Jason Patric, but making him look dorky.

Schumacher followed it up with Cousins, a remake of a French comedy, that once again I liked while the critics didn't.  Then Flatliners, a horror film with a great cast and a passable concept that didn't really work.  After that, Dying Young, a dreary film with the hottest new star in town, Julia Roberts--I remember some magazine predicting it would be the #1 hit of the summer, but that was before anyone saw it.

After that Schumacher made what might be his most critically acclaimed film, Falling Down, a drama about a middle-aged executive fed up with his life who walks across Los Angeles committing acts of mayhem. I found it intriguing, though I haven't seen it since it opened and wonder how it'd play today.  I'd like to see it again simply because I know the layout of Los Angeles so much better and would know where he is throughout the movie.

At this point, Schumacher started doing bigger and bigger films, though they were getting less and less interesting.  He did two John Grisham stories, The Client and A Time To Kill, which aren't bad, though it doesn't seem like he added much to them.  And he also did two Batman films, Batman Forever (Val Kilmer as Batman) and Batman & Robin (George Clooney as Batman).  The former is not highly regarded, while the latter is considered the low point of the Batman franchise.  Perhaps it is, but, aside from the design and a few performances, I don't think much of the Batman films up to that point anyway.

Most of the Schumacher films that followed aren't much.  Some people had hopes for 8MM, the follow-up script from the writer of Se7en, but it's awful.  So is Flawless, starring Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman, which seems to be the kind of film designed to win awards.  Then came the war film Tigerland, which sank without a trace. (Some critics liked it--I've never seen it.)

Schumacher made eight more features, most with decent budgets and good actors.  I wish I could say one or two stuck out, but all of them are undistinguished.  No matter.  He had an up and down career, but he made some decent stuff, often when no one was paying much attention.

Courting

With so much going on, it was easy enough to ignore what would normally have been last week's big story--the major cases handed down by the Supreme Court. Not that they weren't covered.  They just didn't create the excitement they normally would.  Though some conservatives (including some on the court) suggest that's the problem--that the court, under John Roberts, avoids controversial decisions. (Controversial to certain people, that is.)

Thus the sexual orientation case and the DACA case.  Conservative critics find it absurd that Gorsuch, allegedly a textualist, could find the Civil Rights Act of 1964 means things its signers couldn't possible have meant.  And the same critics find it even more bizarre that the Chief Justice says one President can make an executive decision that the next President can't rescind.  Both opinions, they say, are results-oriented jurisprudence.

What got to me, though, is how it was assumed--correctly--that all four liberal justices would vote the same way. Can't they ever surprise us?  Looked at a matter of principle, rather than politics, it doesn't seem like these cases are slam dunks for their side.  Just now and then, can't one of them go a little off the reservation?

IH

Ian Holm has died.  A great character actor, someone you were always glad to see. The obits are mentioning his work in Alien and The Lord Of The Rings series, and even his one Oscar nomination for Chariots Of Fire, but those are not my favorite performances.

So what did I like best?  It's hard to chose, as he was in well over a hundred movies and TV shows, and rarely gave a bad performance.  But here's a top ten of sorts, in chronological order, which also demonstrates the variety of work he did:

Napoloen in Time Bandits

Mr. Kurtzmann in Brazil

Lewis Caroll in Dreamchild

Ken in Another Woman

Polonius in the Mel Gibson Hamlet

Willis in The Madness Of King George

Cornelius in The Fifth Element

Mitchell in The Sweet Hereafter

Kiri Vinokur in eXistenZ

Joe Gould in Joe Gould's Secret

In The Arena

The Arena Cinelounge, a one-screen cinema just up my block, will be the first movie theatre to reopen in Los Angeles.  I'm glad to hear they've got that underdog spirit, but it's still an odd story.

I love the Arena Cinelounge.  They play real independent films--not those indie films that get shown on a couple hundred screens across America, but films you never heard of that get almost no distribution.  I've been a regular since they opened at their current location.

But I just don't think people in L.A. are ready to return to their film-going habits.  And I would have guessed the Cinelounge would be the last place to reopen. The linked article tells us this:

Arena Cinelounge [...] will be in full compliance with public health protocols.  They will take important safety precautions such as a new air purification system, seat disinfecting between screenings, socially distanced seating and concessions specially packaged for contactless delivery.

The Cinelounge is the smallest theatre around.  The seats are very comfortable, but there are less than fifty in the house.  With "socially distanced seating" how many can attend a showing?  Five?  Ten?

They probably won't get that many, anyway,  Or maybe they'll get five or ten people who made the film.  I long for the days we can go to the movies again, but I fear this won't be the start of something big.

BL

Bobby Lewis just died at the age of 95.  Not a major artist, I suppose, but he recorded at least two pretty memorable tunes:

Hugh Cares

Someone sent me a tweet from Hugh Laurie.  I don't usually bother with what celebrities think about politics, but he's saying something a lot of people believe is an important point:

For every hour we spend agonising over societal crimes of the past, we should probably allow a minute or two to wonder what we're doing now that will be similarly condemned a hundred year hence.  Climate, obviously; animal rights, likewise.  What else?

Hugh, I respect you as a performer, but this is pretty stupid.  Here are some other things we're doing now that plenty of people believe we should worry about for the future--excessive government spending, abortion, the spread of socialism.  I could list hundreds of others, of course, but I have to ask you, will you now be spending any time worrying about my list?  Or will you perhaps realize that claiming you know what people will believe in the future is simply an obnoxious way of arguing about what we believe today. (And by the way, those jerks in the future will likely get us wrong--just as we misunderstand the past when we condemn it wholesale--so screw 'em.)

And as a side note, I don't know about "agonizing" (which is how we spell it) over societal crimes of the past.  You can study them and be aware of mistakes that were made, but I don't know if agonizing helps anyone, since you can't change the past.

R&M4

The fourth season of Rick and Morty is over. It was separated into two 5-episode sections, the second airing about five months after the first.  That was annoying, but what about the episodes themselves?

They were good, but this was the first time the new season didn't top the previous one.  I'd say there were only two classic episodes, the eighth--"The Vat of Acid Episode"--and the tenth--"Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri."

Unfortunately, too many of the episodes had the show swallowing its own tale.  For instance, "One Crew over the Crewcoo's Morty" was a parody of all the double, triple and quadruple-crosses we see in caper films, and it got tiresome.  Same for "Never Ricking Morty" where the title characters have to fight their way off a literal Story Train that has them work through many different plots and emotional moments.

I'm not saying any episode was bad, and they all reward second viewings, but much better are more straightforward stories examining how the characters react to outside forces, not comments on storytelling itself.

PS  I watched two new comedy shows, Upload and Space Force. They were both fine, though not great.

Space Force got a lot of negative reviews, but it wasn't that bad, and the cast was excellent--Steve Carrell as the general who at first seems to be another military clown, but turns out to have some nuance; Diana Silvers and the general's bored teenage daughter, Tawny Newsome as Captain Ali, the general's aide who has higher aspiration; and Jimmy O. Yang as one of the leading scientists at Space Force. Above all, there's John Malkovich, as Dr. Mallory, the intelligent, effete chief scientist.

Both Upload (a comedy about the afterlife--coming right after The Good Place finished) and Space Force end season one with cliffhangers.  I don't like this.  If a comedy is funny, I'll be back.  They think it's better if I worry about whether a character will die. It isn't.

I also finally finished Hunters, which came out in February.  I watched the first few episodes of the much-advertised show back when it came out and gave up.  The characters and the politics were gross caricature, and the Holocaust was used as a prop for comic book antics.

Since I've got nothing but times these days, I went back and watched the rest, and it was even worse than I remembered. On top of which, there's a twist at the end so ridiculous that I suspect even fans of the show threw up their hands in disgust.

Anyway, awful, just awful. Despicable, really.

Bad News

Hello, I'm from Los Angeles, but I'm not LA Guy.  However, he has graciously allowed me to write a little piece.

I saw this at the twitter feed of Asymmetric info.  One guy, Greg Sargent, who I don't know, tweeted "Awful new polling for Trump.  Only 32% approve of handling of George Floyd aftermath.  74% think Floyd killing shows broader problem in police treatment of blacks.  57% say police likely to use deadly force against blacks."  And this is retweet by a guy named Will McAvoy, who says "Things are changing quickly."

I don't get why they think this is bad for Trump?  Or even why things are changing.  For a long time Americans have felt that blacks have trouble with cops. It may figure they feel it a little more strongly at present, but it's not a major change if it's a change at all.  And as for them not approving of how Trump handled it, it's because so many believe Trump was feckless, hiding in his basement, rather than sending in the Marines.

The vast majority of Americans were horrified when they saw the George Floyd video, including Trump.  They have a lot of sympathy for the cause of better treatment by the cops.  Yet here's what they don't like.

They don't like looting and violence.

They don't like excuses for looting and violence.

They don't like giving millions in charity to bail out arsonists and murderers.

They don't like endless marches that block traffic and hearing people shout "No justice no peace!"

They don't like people disrespecting the American flag.

They don't like hearing America is irreparably and systematically racist.

They don't like giving money to groups that organize more marches.

They don't like people telling them to shut up and do what they say.

They don't like defunding the police.

They don't like trying to undermine Western Civilization and capitalism.

Yet these are all stances on the left today, stances that Biden has trouble disavowing.  So tell me again why this is bad news for Trump?

BJF

Bruce Jay Friedman has died.  He was a comic writer with a dark side who wrote novels, short stories, plays and movies.

I find his work as a playwright most interesting.  In particular, two plays he wrote fairly early in his career, Scuba Duba (1967) and Steam Bath (1970).  Neither are performed much any more--I wonder how they'd play today?

Scuba Duba, an off-Broadway hit featuring Jerry Orbach, Judd Hirsch and Cleavon Little, dealt with race in a pretty raw way.  In fact, in William Goldman's book on the 1967 Broadway season, he discusses how a man in the audience started shouting at the actors during the performance he saw, and that (if I recall correctly) there was some violence afterwards.

Steam Bath is about, yes, a steam bath, except it represents the afterlife, and the Almighty is the Puerto Rican attendant. The original cast included Tony Perkins and Hector Elizondo.  It's probably Friedman's most-seen play simply because it was done on PBS.  He didn't write too many plays after Steam Bath which is too bad, since I think he had a special talent in the medium.

I haven't read any of Friedman's novels all the way through, so I can't say much about them, though I did like some of his short fiction, and found the non-fiction The Lonely Guy's Book Of Life as well as The Slight Older Guy fascinating. The former was turned into a movie (meaning the screenwriters had to create a plot)--The Lonely Guy (1984) starring Steve Martin and Charles Grodin. It's not great, but worth checking out, especially for Grodin.

Which brings us to Friedman's work in movie and TV, which is less notable simply because he didn't do a lot and much of it was rewritten by others.  For instance, 1972's The Heathbreak Kid (starring Charles Grodin) is a fine piece of work, but while it's based on a Friedman story, I would guess it's Neil Simon's screenplay and Elaine May's direction that make it what it is.

Then there's Stir Crazy (1980), starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, which was a huge hit, but is also a mess.  I'm not sure how much you can credit/blame Friedman's screenplay.  He also gets a story and screenplay credit on the fine comedy Splash (1984), but I'm pretty sure the final version of the screenplay is mostly due to the other credited writers, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.

If nothing else, Friedman had a voice that was his own.  A writer (and reader) can't ask for more.

Will He, Won't He?

Some people are making a big deal of George F. Will's Washington Post column against Trump:

That is it from one of the longtime leading minds of the conservative movement is all the more devastating.

Come now.  As we noted four years ago, Will is no fan of Trump. Whether or not you agree with the column, it's just more of the same.

In fact, as we also noted, he didn't think that much of the Republicans eight years ago.

A "longtime leading mind of the conservative movement."  Is he even in the movement any more?

Quiz 'N' Art

A couple of interesting obits (which is mostly what I write about these days).

First, Herb Stempel.  Didn't know he was still around. He was involved in the 1950s quiz show scandals.  Stempel was good at trivia and appeared on the popular Twenty-One.

However, the show was rigged.  Stempel went along with it, even being coached on how to look and how to answer. Stempel was on for quite a while, winning $69,500 on the show--but told by the producer he'd have to accept less.  In addition, his ratings were dropping, so he'd have to lose to Columbia professor Charles Van Doren.

The question he'd get wrong was what picture won the Academy Award in 1955.  Marty was actually one of Stempel's favorite films, but he had to answer On The Waterfront.

Van Doren became an even bigger star than Stempel.  Stempel spoke out against the program, and eventually there was the scandal and the Congressional investigation.  All the big game shows were canceled, and ever since they've been very careful to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

I don't think it should be illegal to rig a game show.  They're entertainment, and most entertainment on TV is created and edited to please an audience.  The "reality" shows of today are as plotted and planned as any scripted show.

Sure, you don't want to audience to know your show is fake--it takes away all the excitement.  But as long as the audience enjoys the show, what's the harm?

Second, Christo.  He (working with his wife) was a conceptual artist, generally working on large scale, with the environment.

In one of his installations he wrapped a coast in Australia, in another put up a curtain in a Colorado valley. Maybe his most famous piece putting up thousands of huge, blue or yellow umbrellas in California and Japan.

Perhaps Christo's artistic specialty was securing the funding.  In any case, he believed in spreading beauty, and I believe he succeeded.